Vladimir(36)

He nodded. “Yeah, I’ll take a nap. I like a nap.”

“I love a nap. How about you, do you nap?” She sat herself down at the table and beckoned for David to grab another chair.

“No,” I said to her. “I hate naps.”

What I truly hated were conversations about sleep. It felt like all anyone talked about—work and sleep. When Sid was young the world seemed obsessed with sleeping—her sleeping, my sleeping, my husband’s sleeping—the schedule, the tiredness, the endless tiredness.

“Wow, you’re amazing.” Florence winked, to herself it seemed.

“Are you joining me to eat,” I asked them, “or is this an ambush?”

David smiled. “More the latter, unfortunately.”

Florence batted him on the shoulder. “This is not an ambush, don’t say that.” She kept looking nervously at him; it was clear they’d banded together to come and tell me some news that I didn’t want to hear.

David looked around the café. “Maybe we should walk,” he said.

“Scared I’ll make a big scene?” I asked him.

“Not at all!” Florence flipped her hair so that it looked like an ocean wave on the top of her head.

“Yes,” he said.

An image cracked in my mind at that very moment. It was of Vladimir and Cynthia, with faces more weathered than now, holding hands on the front steps of the English Department building, posing for a photograph. John and I, when he was promoted to chair, had posed for a shoot such as this. In quick succession I saw flashes of them posing, climbing the stairs to their offices, kissing chastely, and then Cynthia walking into my office, which was now hers. I stood outside, visible from her window, except I was costumed like a leper in a church musical, with distressed and tea-stained Ace bandages dripping from my arms. I reached toward her in supplication. From her mind’s eye she zoomed in on my face, and it was toothless, tearstained, covered in dirt.

I finished my soup and coffee, put the pastry in my bag, and threw out my garbage as they waited for me by the door. I was seized by the impulse to run. This felt like the walk that a doomed man takes with a couple of Mafia stooges. The walk Camille Claudel took with her brother before he locked her up in that insane asylum for the rest of her life.

We left together in silence. There was a narrow, poorly designed rocky stairway that led from the café to the grounds. David held tightly on to the railing and limped down the stairs. When I asked about his injury, he told me that he had helped move Mercy, his daughter, in with her fiancé over the past weekend and had injured the lower right part of his back. “Fiancé,” I said, and congratulated him. “He’s a great guy, we really like him,” he said, nodding sadly. “They don’t want a big wedding, so that’s a relief.” And we fell into silence again, trudging over the grass until we reached a footpath that encircled the campus.

Florence began.

“You know that John’s trial begins on the twentieth?”

“His hearing,” I corrected.

“Were you planning on attending?”

“No,” I said. I was in fact ambivalent, but I didn’t want to admit that ambivalence to either of them.

“Good,” she said.

David started in. “Look, you know the times we are living in.”

“Certainly I do.”

“Absurd, you have to be so careful, you get no support from the administration—nothing to back you up—the students rule the roost—you know what I mean.”

“What are you getting at? Did I do something wrong? Something offensive?”

Florence shook her head vigorously. “No no no no no no no no no no.”

“So then what is it?”

As Florence seemed unable to speak, David nodded at her to show he would take over. If there weren’t such a discrepancy of attractiveness between the two, I would think they were together.

“Please, David, just say what you’re going to say, this is agonizing,” I said.

Without deciding, we all stopped walking.

“A number of students have expressed that, given the circumstances of John’s case, they find your presence in the classroom to be objectionable, even triggering. They feel as though you were complicit in the alleged indiscretions. They have asked that you stop teaching classes immediately until the hearing is over. Depending on the verdict, they asked that we then reassess the situation.”

A heavy ball sank into the base of my stomach, and my arms and chest tightened in anger. “And what does the department say?”

“We don’t think that the students should have the say about who comes and goes here,” David said quickly.

“Still,” Florence cut in, “we want them to feel heard. Some of the students have suffered sexual assault, and to be in the presence of a rapist’s wife—”

“My husband is not a rapist.”

“Maybe not according to you—”

“According to anyone.”

“He used his power and position to find women thirty years his junior to fuck.”

“And that’s still not anywhere near rape.”

David put his hand out to quiet Florence. “Let’s not say that word. She’s right, it was never used.”